milk in their tea, when they could get tea. Some mornings, a cup of hot water was all Jenny and Mick had to start the day. That hadn’t happened often, but once was enough to remind you how easy it would be just to fall off the edge.
After a hot drink, Jenny would take her sack into the woods and try to collect enough firewood to give them a few hours of heat in the evening. Between the union executives always calling them ‘comrade’ and the wood gathering, she felt like a Siberian peasant. At least they were lucky to live right by a source of fuel. It was, she knew, a lot harder for other folk. It was their good fortune that they’d kept their open fireplace. The miners’ perk of cheap coal had seen to that.
She went about her task mechanically, paying little attention to her surroundings, turning over the latest spat between her and Mick. It sometimes seemed it was only the hardship that kept them together, only the need for warmth that kept them in the same bed. The strike had brought some couples closer together, but plenty had split like a log under an axe after those first few months, once their reserves had been bled dry.
It hadn’t been so bad at the start. Since the last wave of strikes in the seventies, the miners had earned good money. They were the kings of the trade union movement - well paid, well organized and well confident. After all, they’d brought down Ted Heath’s government back then. They were untouchable. And they had the cash to prove it.
Some spent up to the hilt - foreign holidays where they could expose their milk-white skin and coal tattoos to the sun, flash cars with expensive stereos, new houses that looked great when they moved in but started to scuff round the edges almost at once. But most of them, made cautious by history, had a bit put by. Enough to cover the rent or the mortgage, enough to feed the family and pay the fuel bills for a couple of months. What had been horrifying was how quickly those scant savings had disappeared. Early on, the union had paid decent money to the men who piled into cars and vans and minibuses to join flying pickets to working pits, power stations and coking plants. But the police had grown increasingly heavy-handed in making sure the flyers never made it to their destinations and there was little enthusiasm for paying men for failing to reach their objectives. Besides, these days the union bosses were too busy trying to hide their millions from the government’s sequestrators to be bothered wasting money in a fight they had to know in their hearts was doomed. So even that trickle of cash had run dry and the only thing left for the mining communities to swallow had been their pride.
Jenny had swallowed plenty of that over the past nine months. It had started right at the beginning when she’d heard the Scottish miners would support the Yorkshire coalfield in the call for a national strike not from Mick but from Arthur Scargill, President of the National Union of Mineworkers. Not personally, of course. Just his yapping harangue on the TV news. Instead of coming straight back from the Miners’ Welfare meeting to tell her, Mick had been hanging out with Andy and his other union pals, drinking at the bar like money was never going to be a problem. Celebrating King Arthur’s battle-cry in the time-honoured way. The miners united will never be defeated.
The wives knew the hopelessness of it all, right from the start. You go into a coal strike at the beginning of winter, when the demand from the power stations is at its highest. Not in the spring, when everybody’s looking to turn off their heating. And when you go for major industrial action against a bitch like Margaret Thatcher, you cover your back. You follow the labour laws. You follow your own rules. You stage a national ballot. You don’t rely on a dubious interpretation of a resolution passed three years before for a different purpose. Oh yes, the wives had known it was futile. But they’d kept their mouths shut and, for the first time ever, they’d built their own organization to support their men. Loyalty, that was what counted in the pit villages and mining communities.
And so Mick and Jenny were still hanging together. Jenny sometimes wondered if the only reason Mick was still with her and Misha was because he had nowhere else to go. Parents dead, no brothers or sisters, there was no obvious bolthole. She’d asked him once and he’d frozen like a statue for a long moment. Then he’d scoffed at her, denying he wanted to be gone, reminding her that Andy would always put him up in his cottage if he wanted to be away. So, no reason why she should have imagined that Friday was different from any other.
Thursday 28th June 2007; Newton of Wemyss
‘So this wasn’t the first time he’d gone off with his paints for the day?’ Karen said. Whatever was going on in Jenny Prentice’s head, it was clearly a lot more than the bare bones she was giving up.
‘Four or five times a week, by the end.’
‘What about you? What did you do for the rest of the day?’
‘I went up the woods for some kindling, then I came back and watched the news on the telly. It was quite the day, that Friday. King Arthur was in court for police obstruction at the Battle of Orgreave. And Band Aid got to number one. I tell you, I could have spat in their faces. All that effort for bairns thousands of miles away when there were hungry kids on their own doorsteps. Where was Bono and Bob Geldof when our kids were waking up on Christmas morning with bugger all in their stockings?’
‘It must have been hard to take,’ Karen said.
‘It felt like a slap in the face. Nothing glamorous about helping the miners, was there?’ A bitter little smile lit up her face. ‘Could have been worse, though. We could have had to put up with that sanctimonious shite Sting. Not to mention his bloody lute.’
‘Right enough.’ Karen couldn’t hide her amusement. Gallows humour was never far from the surface in these mining communities. ‘So, what did you do after the TV news?’
‘I went down the Welfare. Mick had said something about a food handout. I got in the queue and came home with a packet of pasta, a tin of tomatoes and two onions. And a pack of dried Scotch broth mix. I mind I felt pretty pleased with myself. I collected Misha from the school and I thought it might cheer us up if we put up the Christmas decorations, so that’s what we did.’
‘When did you realize it was late for Mick to be back?’
Jenny paused, one hand fiddling with a button on her overall. ‘That time of year, it’s early dark. Usually, he’d be back not long after me and Misha. But with us doing the decorations, I didn’t really notice the time passing.’
She was lying, Karen thought. But why? And about what?
Friday 14th December 1984; Newton of Wemyss
Jenny had been one of the first in the queue at the Miners’ Welfare and she’d hurried home with her pitiful bounty, determined to get a pot of soup going so there would be something tasty for the tea. She rounded the pithead baths building, noticing all her neighbours’ houses were in darkness. These days, nobody left a welcoming light on when they went out. Every penny counted when the fuel bills came in.
When she turned in at her gate, she nearly jumped out of her skin. A shadowy figure rose from the darkness, looming huge in her imagination. She made a noise halfway between a gasp and a moan.
‘Jenny, Jenny, calm down. It’s me. Tom. Tom Campbell. I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to scare you.’ The shape took form and she recognized the big man standing by her front door.
‘Christ, Tom, you gave me the fright of my life,’ she complained, moving past him and opening the front door. Conscious of the breathtaking chill of the house, she led the way into the kitchen. Without hesitation, she filled her soup pan with water and put it on the stove, the gas ring giving out a tiny wedge of heat. Then she turned to face him in the dimness of the afternoon light. ‘How are you doing?’
Tom Campbell shrugged his big shoulders and gave a halfhearted smile. ‘Up and down,’ he said. ‘It’s ironic. The one time in my life I really needed my pals and this strike happens.’
‘At least you’ve got me and Mick,’ Jenny said, waving him to a chair.
‘Well, I’ve got you, anyway. I don’t think I’d be on Mick’s Christmas card list, always supposing anybody was sending any this year. Not after October. He’s not spoken to me since then.’